Who Is Aqua Buddha?

There have been some developments in the Aqua Buddha story. To review, Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for senator from Kentucky, found himself saying, on Fox News,

No, I never was involved with kidnapping. No, I never was involved with forcibly drugging people.

And that is, of course, good to know. The denial was prompted by a report, from GQ, about Paul’s alleged membership in something called the NoZe while a student at Baylor:

Sort of a cross between Yale’s Skull & Bones and Harvard’s Lampoon, the NoZe existed to torment the Baylor administration, which it accomplished through pranks and its satirical newspaper The Rope. The group especially enjoyed tweaking the school’s religiosity. “We aspired to blasphemy,” says John Green, another of Paul’s former NoZe Brothers.

So far not so disastrous—sort of in keeping with the Paul family’s libertarian bent. (See Hertzberg for more on that.) Can we go back to worrying about the Darrelle Revis hold-out, maybe? But then comes the Aqua-Buddha part:

The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

Baylor must have been an interesting place if the “big no-no” in that story was “worshipping idols.” But then again:

Nearly 30 years later, the woman is still trying to make sense of that afternoon. “They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke.”

That brings us to Wednesday. (And past Paul’s apology for suggesting that people at a church picnic might throw beer at him—see Ben Smith for why that was particularly un-Kentuckian of him.) Continuing her effort to make sense of that afternoon, the woman told the Washington Post (GQ put them in touch) that “she didn’t mean to imply that she was kidnapped ‘in a legal sense…. He did not drug me,” she said. “He did not force me physically in any way.” Where does that leave things?

She added that the whole thing was so “weird” that afterwards she ended relations with Paul and his friends.

So “weird”: kind of like election season.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

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